


Far Away, So Close

by blythechild



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Absence, Denial of Feelings, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Relationships, Minor Character Death, Past Relationship(s), Phone Calls & Telephones, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-05
Updated: 2013-05-05
Packaged: 2017-12-10 13:05:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/786346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythechild/pseuds/blythechild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prentiss tries to get Reid to open up about his grief for Maeve but finds that there's only so much you can do when an ocean separates you.</p><p> </p><p>This is a work of fanfiction as as such I do not claim ownership over the characters herein. It was created as a personal amusement. This story contains mature themes, sexual content, and discussion of death, and should not be read by those under the age of 18.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Far Away, So Close

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is in response to a hurt/comfort prompt in the livejournal community, comment_fic. 
> 
> As an additional warning, Reid/Maeve 'shippers may not appreciate how I have characterized this pairing here. If you have strong feelings about this pair, please stop reading now. I don't dislike Maeve but I also do not have a deep reservoir of feeling for a character whose sole purpose was to die in order to flesh out Reid's personal life. Consider yourself warned. Also the Reid/Maeve references are remembrances in this story - Maeve never actually appears here.

Her hand shook as she dialed the number. She knew it by heart but hadn’t programmed it into the contact list of her new mobile; she hadn’t called it in almost eight months. It only rang once before he picked up.

_"Listen, I know that all of you are worried but stop calling, stop sending fruit baskets, and stop coming by my place, alright? I don’t need you. I don’t want you around. Just leave me the hell alone."_

She pulled the phone away from her ear and rechecked the number. Then she awkwardly cleared her throat and tried to control her trembling.

“Reid? Is that you?”

It sounded like him, and it didn’t. The fast patter was definitely him, but the words, the undisguised anger suggested another man entirely. She had to remind herself that it had been eight months and a lot had happened in the interim. The pause that stretched out over the connection gave her enough time to consider just how bad an idea this had been to begin with.

_"Emily?"_

“Yeah, its me.”

 _"Oh. I didn’t even look at the number…"_ It was almost an apology, but not quite. _"Who told you to call?"_

“Garcia. And then J.J. And then Derek. They’re all pretty worried about your state of mind.”

 _"And they decided that **you** would be the voice of reason that I’d listen to."_ The acid in his voice stung so intensely that she jerked her ear away from the phone again on instinct. 

“I-I… none of them know… about what happened.” She swallowed hard. “I guess that they all assume that we still talk.”

He snerked loudly and then sighed with the kind of exhaustion that almost made him physically manifest before her eyes. She remembered him _that_ exhausted and she wanted to reach out and wrap him up in that moment, regardless of whether he hated her or not. Thank god he spoke before she had a chance to utter something vulnerable and stupid.

_"What do you want, Emily? I’m not using, if that’s what you’re concerned about."_

She took a deep breath. “I want you to tell me about her.”

 _"Screw you."_ He whispered after a moment.

“No, seriously, Spencer. No one really knows anything about Maeve except the horrible way her life ended and the few insights that you gave them in order to track her down. Tell me about this woman whom you kept secret for more than half a year and who was powerful enough to make you fall in love over the phone.”

As soon as she had said it, she wanted the words back. They were bitter and they mocked his pain. What right had she to question the motives of his heart? Maybe this mystery woman had been the love of his life. Maybe the night of J.J. and Will’s wedding had just been a blip on his radar. Maybe the dancing had just been dancing. Maybe when he walked her to Rossi’s door to say goodnight, and she’d pulled him close, he’d just gone with it, moved by the moment. And maybe when she’d let him into her apartment an hour later, shaking as they fumbled, letting the sex take hold until all she could read in his eyes was a single gratified _‘finally’_ \- it had just been a precipitous instant in time. When he sunk into her again, and again, and again just before dawn - consuming her like someone who didn’t know if he’d see another meal - it was probably just a convenient confluence of events and nothing more. When their words blended into one seamless statement: _I never thought…I can’t believe…Wanted so much…Waited too long…Was a fool…pleasepleasepleasesaythatagain…Never knew that it would feel this way…_ \- that was just endorphins. Six years of watching his eyes follow her and then realizing, after a while, that hers were following him as well - that was a perfectly natural response. Nothing to write home about. She had been an anomaly; Maeve had been the real thing. 

She hated her jealousy almost as much as he hated her right now.

He hadn’t hung up on her, which was more than she would’ve done if their roles had been reversed, but his breathing told her that she was seconds away from hearing the last words that Spencer Reid would ever say to her. She wished that she had the balls, and the time, to say what she really meant: that she had fucked up and that she would do it all differently if she had the chance. But it was eight months too late for that conversation.

_"You don’t get to ask that, and you have no right to know her."_

“You know what, you’re right. I shouldn’t have asked. But I need to understand it a little so that I know that you’ll make it through this. I guess I should’ve framed it like that.” She took another deep breath and tried again to act like a grown up. “Regardless of what happened between us, Spence, I need to know that you’ll eventually be okay. That’s all anybody wants - we don’t expect it right now, but we want to feel like we’ve got a shot at helping you with that.”

_"I can’t give them that. Not when they all just stood around and let her die."_

“I read the case file, Spencer. There was no clean shot in that situation.” She said cautiously.

 _"Really? And what was the worst that could’ve happened if one of them had tried?"_ His voice rose a little, getting into that hysterical tone that he only used when he was cornered. _"She’s still dead."_

“C’mon, Spence, that’s not fair…”

_"You should’ve been there."_

“You think that _I_ would’ve taken the shot?”

_"No, I don’t. But if you had been here Maeve would still be alive."_

“Wait… are you blaming me for her death? ‘Cause that’s bull-”

 _"If you were here I never would’ve gone looking for her in the first place!"_ He bellowed down the line. _"I wouldn’t have made her my whole world, believing that she could fill the emptiness in my life with talk of research papers and books and phone sex."_

She heard him take a shallow, shaky breath and imagined that she only heard it because she was holding her own in disbelief.

_"I knew Maeve for eight months and I only met her on the day she died. And I loved her - I. Loved. Her. Now just imagine what I might have felt if I worked beside her for, say, six years. If I knew almost every important thing about her, if I had wanted her for so long that it started to feel like the desire had always been there… imagine **that** and then losing it. What would you do?"_

She was shaking hard enough that she had to grip the phone tightly so that she wouldn’t drop it. She opened her mouth to say something - anything - but she only managed to make dry clicking noises.

 _"I lose everyone that I care about eventually - Maeve is just a more visceral example than most. My life taints everything. At least you understood that - you had a fighting chance. I had hoped…"_ His words gave out for an instant. _"…But Maeve was innocent. You are just as responsible for her death as everyone who didn’t pull the trigger that day."_

“Spencer…” Now the shaking was in her voice too.

_"Tell me one thing. Did you make the decision to leave the Bureau and take the Interpol job before or after we were together?"_

Her lungs told her that she was on her own with this one and she barely managed to squeak out “Before, but-”.

It turned out that she didn’t have to worry about anything after that as Reid hung up on her.

\----

The phone just kept ringing. After his voicemail filled up and when he grew tired of declining calls and hearing the sound of his text alert, he dumped it in his Brita pitcher and put the whole thing back in his fridge. The silly kid part of his grown up brain wondered if the fizzled SIM card might flavor his water with resentment.

Screw them all. They wanted him to return to the safety of the nerdy, awkward, sexless creature that they all treated like a cherished pet - the twisted but adorable mascot of the BAU. They didn’t want to worry about him. They didn’t like the guilt that they carried around after misreading him for so long and then utterly failing him when he asked for help. Too bad. He didn’t like being afraid or getting shot or watching people die or loving in vain or being irretrievably alone. Life is full of shitty compromises - he was jaded enough to know that now. He didn’t care if his grief was uncomfortable or inconvenient for them - it was _his_ and they had no right to it, no right to Maeve. He didn’t care if they loved him when he never had a chance to tell Maeve what she meant to him - let them suffer in their useless love as he was suffering in his. She’d never know how she eased his brokenness and made him ache a little less when she laughed at his stupid jokes. He’d never be able to say “You saved me from despair” and she’d never respond with “And you saved me from a stalker, so I guess we’re even”. He’d never have a chance to feel guilty about not being able to love her as much as he loved another…

He was angry with every single one of them but that wasn’t why he was pushing them away. The anger would fade - he understood the stages of grief - but distance was the only thing that would keep them safe now. Because beneath the anger there was still love - they were still his family. Even Prentiss. _Always_ Prentiss… If he lost every one he loved, his brilliant mind had settled on _‘just stop loving them’_ as the solution. It shouldn’t be too hard, he told himself, and he had never had much luck with love anyway.

Someone knocked on his door. The security gate usually stopped them - only Hotch had figured out how to get past it - so his curiosity forced him to shuffle through the heaps of thrown books and broken furniture to his front door. There was no peephole so he’d either have to open up or ignore his visitor altogether. He was mulling his choices, scratching at his scruffy beard, when the knock sounded again. He opened the door and found a weary, travel-worn Emily Prentiss on his doorstep, and his first thought was that he’d wished he had shaved that morning.

“What are you doing here? How did you get past the security gate?”

“Interpol agent.” She raised her hand and gave him a look that said the answer would be obvious to someone much dumber than he.

She tried to smile but it just emphasized the lines around her eyes and the dark circles under them. It had been four days since he hung up on her and it looked like she hadn’t slept since then.

“You look like hell.” He said flatly.

“So do you. This new homeless look isn’t doing you any favors.” She gestured to his beard, his unkempt hair, his ratty housecoat… “Can I come in?”

“What for? I don’t have anything else to say.”

“Well, I do. You hung up before I could finish my sentence.”

“You flew across the Atlantic to finish your sentence?”

She nodded, pressing her lips together in determination. “You wouldn’t pick up the phone…”

“Its in the fridge.”

Confusion tripped across her features but she shook it away clearly trying to stay focused on the mission that had driven her 3670 miles.

“You can slam the door in my face if you want, but I’m not leaving. I’ll sleep on your stoop if I have to. Eventually you’re going to have to go out for something, and I’ll be there when you do. I’m not going to give up.”

“This is stalking, you know.”

“This is determined desperation.”

And there was something desperate about her. He wasn’t used to that on her - it made him uneasy. It was fine for him to imagine Prentiss out in the world as he had always known her, even if it drove the blade in deeper, but an unsteady, unsure Prentiss was like a cold sweat that darkened everything. Maybe he just didn’t want one more thing to feel guilty about, or maybe he didn’t want to explain to DCPD why the London Section Chief of Interpol was camped out in his apartment building… 

“You can say what you came here to say but then you have to leave. No arguments.” He stepped away from the door - a tacit invitation in. “Mind the books…”

She stepped gingerly through the piles of detritus and he realized that it was very dark in his apartment. He hadn’t thought about turning on a light in days. She muttered something sounding like ‘what the-’ and tripped before she could finish the thought. He caught her quickly by the wrist and at the waist preventing her from joining his book collection. They stared at each other for a second in the gloom before he let her go and moved to turn on a table lamp. He slumped into an old leather chair with dramatic disinterest to cover the accelerated beating of his heart.

“So, what did you want to tell me?”

She came to stand in front of his old couch opposite him. It was covered in books too so she was forced to perch on the armrest.

“You asked me if I had made the decision to go to London before or after we slept together.”

“And you said ‘before’.”

“That’s true but you didn’t let me finish.”

“Would the rest of your sentence have made me feel less disposable somehow?”

“Would hearing either option have made you feel better?” She countered leaning towards him slightly. “You heard ‘before’ and thought that I was being callous. If you heard ‘after’, you would’ve thought me insensitive or underwhelmed. Am I right?”

“How would you feel when faced with those options?”

“Let me tell you how I _did_ feel. I felt amazed and terrified… you made me feel whole, Spencer, like something smooth and unbroken, all of my cracks and divots filled in for the first time ever. But I also felt the wrongness of my life at the Bureau closing in on me. I wrestled with my decision to leave after being with you - I _meant_ all of those things we said to each other that night, I _wanted_ all of that and more…”

Reid shifted uncomfortably in his comfy chair. He knew that whatever she had to say was only going to make him feel worse.

“But?”

“But… the job wasn’t healthy for me anymore. How long could I have maintained something healthy _with you_ in that situation?”

“So you’re saying that your leaving had nothing to do with me, but you thought about me a lot before coming to that conclusion - is that right? And this is supposed to make me feel better, especially in light of Maeve’s murder.”

She got up and ruthlessly ran her fingers through her hair in exasperation. “Christ, you can be fucking insufferable some times! I can’t make everything right with a few words! I can only tell you-”

She stopped and switched tactics, falling to her knees suddenly in front of him and calmly laying a hand on one of his knees in supplication. “What I’m saying is that you weren’t alone - I felt what you felt, and then I went and made a _really bad_ decision that screwed everything up. And yeah, maybe you can lay part of the blame for Maeve’s murder at my feet… I don’t think that I can honestly say that I don’t deserve that. And it hurts to hear how you loved her… and it hurts to see you take this on alone… and so…”

She paused and looked down at the floor. When he thought that she wouldn’t continue he leaned forward, but she looked up and stared him square in the eye as she started again.

“So, I’m here to listen to you, to hear about her and the way she made you feel because someone’s got to be. I owe you that. You don’t have to talk until you’re ready but I’m not going anywhere until you do.”

Well. He hadn’t expected that.

“I’m not comfortable with this.” He whispered.

“Neither am I, which is why I’m convinced that it’s going to help us both.”

“What happens if I’m not ready to talk any time soon?”

“I’ve taken a leave of absence. I’m here for however long it takes.”

He leaned further forward so that his shadow covered her as she sat at his feet.

“What if I refuse to talk?”

“I’m not going anywhere.” She stared back at him and he watched the uncertainty evaporate from her instantly. Maeve had been steely in the end - he would always be proud of her for that - but Prentiss was titanium-sealed-in-concrete-wrapped-in-chains-and-dropped-to-the-ocean-floor kinda strong. She was the only one that ever had a fighting chance with him.

“And what happens after I’ve told you everything?” He whispered, fighting the urge to skim her cheek with a fingertip. _Not now. Not yet. There’s so much to fix…_

She sat up a little straighter so that their faces were inches away from one another. “I have a suspicion that I _still_ won’t be going anywhere.”

He covered his face with his hands because he knew that he couldn’t hide the way that he was going to crumble in front of her. Grief and gratitude blended with rage and adoration as his body quietly hitched with his sobs. Perhaps he couldn’t be alone after all - he wasn’t built that way - but he couldn’t let just anyone in either. They had to know who he was and what they were getting into. They had to sign on for the darkness and the threats - they had to stare down the possibility of a bloody end and not flinch. He hadn’t asked Maeve any of those questions and _that_ was on him, but Prentiss? Well, he knew that he’d never have to ask. And it seemed as if she’d be nearly impossible to push away.

He felt her hands run along his leg and gently shift him to one side of his chair. Then her body slotted into the new space as she wrapped her warmth around him and let him cry. He held onto her and thought of Maeve, and then thought of himself, and finally thought of he and Emily together, and didn’t give a damn that all of emotions bled into one another. This was _his_ \- and maybe it was a little bit Emily’s as well - and they were going to do whatever they damn well wanted with it. Maybe he’d been holding onto it, and holding every one else at bay, because he had been waiting for this. It had to be the right person…

When he ran out of energy and the tears started to dry along his cheeks, he still held onto her, getting lost in the small movements of her fingers as she stroked his hands. He wasn’t sure if he said it aloud but he hoped that she understood it implicitly; he sighed and closed his eyes, allowing all of his thanks to inhabit one single word. _Finally._


End file.
